Latest / CrossPolitic Show / Can Roman Catholicism Build Great Nations?
Transcript
- An emperor is standing barefoot in the snow. And he is waiting for a door to open. Behind that door is the most powerful man in Europe, not a king, not an emperor, a bishop. The Pope has excommunicated him, cut him off from the sacraments, and told his subject they are no longer required to obey him. Now the emperor, Henry IV, ruler of Christendom has come to beg. He will stand in the snow for three days, and the Pope will make him wait. Right now in 2026, some of the loudest voices in America are telling you that the world we need to return to and bring back is that one. The only way to renew America is for America to go home to Rome. What guided the pilgrims to the new world? What settled the spines of the first settlers and explorers? What faith grounded man and women to weave together a complex, decentralized network of loyalties and checks and balances, something that the world has never seen before? In what faith when it took root built the freest nation in the history of man, an emperor in the snow barefoot, a nation on its knees at the castle gate, and a church holding the keys to the soul of the king and the crown. The other set of blueprints builds a free people. By the end you will know which church builds free nations. You will know which one cannot, and you will know exactly what is being asked of you and of your children. And the men on your screen tell you it's time to come home to Rome. When Jesus ascended into heaven, he set all authority in heaven and earth had been given to him. And he gave his disciples a job. No, make disciples of the nation's baptizing and teaching them to obey everything that he commanded. And his disciples went. They told every man regardless of rank, to submit to Christ. 300 years later a Roman emperor listened. His name was Constantine. He publicly submitted to Jesus and he began trying to honor him and the laws of the empire. For the first time in human history a nation of magistrates had been baptized. What does it actually look like for a nation to obey Jesus? In the year 390 a century after Constantine and Emperor Theodias is ruling a Christian empire and he has just lost his temper. A ride is broken out in the city of Vesla Nica, a Roman officer is killed and Theodias in his rage orders repraisal. And so you get 7,000 citizens that are slaughtered. And when the news reaches million, the bishop there, a man named Ambrose, does something no one had ever done before. He acts communicates the Emperor until Theodias humbles himself and repents. No descendants in the Roman Empire can be carried out until 30 days after it's pronounced. So that no Emperor in a rage ever does what he just did. That is what the Great Commission looks like in public. A bishop with no army teaches an emperor with every army how to obey Jesus. Some could no longer defend itself. The legions were gone, the emperors were weak, and the civil government crumbled. The only institution left standing in the west was the church. And so bishops began to fill the vacuum. In 452, Bishop Leo rode out to meet a till of the Hun and negotiated the withdrawal of the Huns from Northern Italy. Then on Christmas Day in the year 800, Pope Leo III placed a crown on the head of Charlemagne. And declared him Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. So in 500 years, the Bishop of Rome had gone from this prophetic voice, correcting an emperor, to the man who makes the Emperor. Pope Gregory declared that only the church could appoint bishops, not emperors, not kings, the Pope. While it's true that politicians should not appoint pastors, when the Holy Roman Empire Henry IV defied the Pope, he excommunicated him. And then he did something even more devastating. He declared that because Henry was cut off from the sacraments, his subjects were no longer required to obey him. A revolt began, the nobles of the Empire started looking for a new emperor. Henry's throne was going out from under him. So in January 1077, and the dead of winter, Henry IV walked across the Alps. He arrived at the castle of Canosa. He took off his royal robes. He put on the rough wall of a penitent. And the fact that one's relationship to God was completely dependent upon one's access to the sacramental system of the Church of Rome. And that's how you could end up bringing a king or an emperor to the door of the Vatican Palace seeking forgiveness. It was using sacramental power as political power. That is a tool Ambrose used to stop a massacre, but that's now being used to undermine a kingdom. The same weapon, a completely different purpose. That's what Roman Catholic political theology looks like with the keys to the kingdom. The Pope had the sacraments, the Pope had the crowns, and now the Pope had the armies. By the high Middle Ages, she was the operating system of all of Western Christendom. But basically the Church is top down and really presides over everything. And that means everything has to be ultimately cleared by the Church, everything that you do. Now that is the world Martin Luther was born into. A world in which the Church held the keys to your soul and the keys to your king. So in the year 1510, five years before he would change the history of the world, a young German monk makes a pilgrimage to Rome and his name was... I'm reminded of Luther when he walked all the way to Rome from Germany. One of the things that scandalized him here comes all these men on horses and armor on a horse is the Pope himself and he is a warrior. Luther went home, he read his Bible, and seven years later he nailed 95 Theses to a church door in Vittenburg. And the machine that froze an emperor out of his own kingdom finally met its match. One monk with a Bible. In 1517, a German monk nailed 95 Theses to a church door. Most Americans think that was the start of a religious argument. It wasn't. It was the start of a wager. A wager against 1700 years of sacramental power. A wager that grace does not flow through a man in Rome. A wager that God's word out ranks every bishop, every council, and every pope on earth. In the Western church, Latin church, Roman Catholic church made its bet with Aristotle. Basically, no, you know, the reference point for Christianity is the Hebrew scriptures. And you know, when Christ says search the scriptures, he never says go search Aristotle. And what he just told you is the single most important thing to understand about the reformation. It was not just some fight over how many sacraments there were. It was a fight over which book runs the world. By the 16th century, the Roman Catholic church had built an entire system on salvation of the sacraments. If you wanted grace, you went to a priest. If you wanted your sins forgiven, you paid for it. If you wanted heaven, you better hope that at the moment of death, you're in the state of grace of the church approved of. And if the pope was angry at your king, well, every priest in your country, they were ordered to stop. Stop the sacraments, no grace, no hope for you. Martin Luther's discovery blew it all apart in one sentence. A man is justified before a guy by faith alone, apart from works, apart from sacraments, apart from priest, apart from the pope. In a society where the gospel is preached, where free grace is preached, where justification by faith alone is preached, you're going to have a large number of born-again individuals, people who worship God in spirit and in truth. People who are enslaved to their sins cannot build free institutions. But the only way to strike off the shackles of sin is with free grace. The gospel of grace, which is appropriated by faith alone. Free grace produces free men, which produces free societies. Protestant nations built free institutions and Catholic nations did not. If justification by faith alone pulled the soul out from under the pope, solar scripture pulled everything else out from under him. Every pope, every council, every bishop, every cardinal, every tradition, every decree. All of them stand under the Bible. None of them stand over it. No human authority is absolute, which means that when tyranny begins to develop in any one of those three governments, family government, church government, or civic government, it becomes possible for a courageous man with an open Bible to challenge the authority. Because for a thousand years before the Reformation, no one could say thus say at the Lord to the Pope, the Pope was the only one who got to say that. But Luther said it. Calvin said it. My homeboy John Knox, he said it. And every tyrant since then in a pulpit or on a throne has had one less place to hide. It was a political Reformation that started in the mouth of God. Here's one of the things Rome will tell you about the Reformation. That Luther split the church, that the reformers were schismatics, that Protestantism shattered Christian unity and gave the world 10,000 denominations. The early reformers did not think that they were establishing a new denomination. They thought that they were one political faction within the one true church. And the papal party was another political faction within that church. But the Magistarial Reformers simply wanted to reform the abuses. The Anabaptists wanted to leave the Abandoned Ship. So if you ask a Magistarial Protestant today, where was your church before the Reformation? The appropriate answer I think is where was your face before you watched it? The Reformers did not start a new church. They asked for a council. Rome refused and then Rome excommunicated them in who asked for that council. So when a Roman Catholic tells you Protestants split the church, ask them who refused the council. The Reformation didn't stay in the pulpit. Within a generation it had reshaped Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Scotland, England, and eventually the nation that was not yet America. Why? When the indulgent sellers go into Germany selling their indulgences, they were paying for these indulgences, was immediately leaving Germany. But they also chafed against it because they were Germans. The power of Rome had helped to hold together the political alliances of the old world, which were already strained. They were going to break eventually. Something was going to accomplish it. What accomplished it was the Protestant Reformation. The machine that had held Europe together for a thousand years, machine that put an emperor in the snow was about to meet a press, a Bible, and a German monk who didn't know how to shut up. And the nations of Europe began to remember something they had long forgotten. They answered to God directly, not through Rome. Luther and Calvin did not teach the church rules the state. They did not teach the state rules the church. They taught a proper understanding of the two kingdoms. The civil magistrate answers directly to Jesus Christ. The church answers directly to Jesus Christ. Both carry true authority in their own jurisdictions, both bow to Him. That's why Protestant nations tend to build free institutions and Catholic nations tend to build ordered ones. Because when neither kingdom can dominate the other, something strange and beautiful begins to happen. A free people can be born. And so we have the wager. Grace does not flow through a man in Rome. It flows through the finish work of Christ received by faith and authorized by the Word of God. That was the theology. But theology comes out your fingertips and out the mouths of kings and out the laws of nations. And when the reformers started reading their Bibles, really reading them. They found something in the Old Testament that Rome had lost. A word the Pope could not give them. A word that would build a nation. Covenant. Aude Fontes. Back to the sources. Back past the Pope, past councils, past the traditions to the Word of God in the languages God gave it in. And when their former's walked back into the Old Testament, they found a God who does not run a fixed cosmos. He makes promises. He breaks into history. He redeems what is broken. He calls nations out of slavery. A covenant cannot be walked away from. A covenant is a solemn oath sworn before God with witnesses that God himself personally blesses or curses in history. This is what a covenant is. A metaphysical bond that God himself enforces. And here is what the reformers realize that most nobody talks about really anymore today. And nation can be a covenant too. This is the point where Protestantism and Rome part ways forever. And the Roman system grace flows through the hierarchy of the church. Marriage is a sacrament, which means for a marriage to be holy, it must be blessed by a priest. For a king to be holy, the Pope must place the crown on his head. For anything in human life to be graced, the church must sacredize it or sacramentalize it. Grace flows through the pipes Rome built. The reformers rejected that entirely. Grace does not flow mechanically through the church. Grace flows personally and covenantally from Jesus Christ through his spirit to his people in whatever station of life he has placed us. You don't need a priest to sanctify your life. You need the finished work of Christ and a Bible open on the table at all times. The single shift changed everything including eventually the kind of nation Americans would build. Because the Bible is actually full of covenants. Abraham and a Bimolec. Jacob and Laban. Most of those are not they're not saving covenants. They're civil covenants. They're political covenants. They are solemn oaths that bind rulers and people together before the living God. And the reformers saw something in those covenants that Rome had never seen. If a ruler breaks covenant with his people, if he violates the oath he saw before God, then the people have a right before God to resist him. Federalism is a decentralized organization. Subsidiarism is always going to be centralized. Subsidiarity is a top-down scheme. Federalism allows you to have what we had in America, which is a lot of communities all based in covenant but not necessarily coordinated together. And I think the great battle in the 21st century is over whether we're going to have centralized systems or decentralized systems. Decentralized communities all based in covenant. That is not an abstraction. That is actually the architecture of the United States of America. Every colony was founded on a covenant. Every town meeting opened with prayer. Every constitution ratified by the consent of the govern before the face of God. America is not a contract. America is a covenant. And if you understand that, you'll understand what happened in 1776. The Protestant covenantal is the foundation of Protestant-resistant theory. Shannon Rutherford had written Lex Rex, the law's king. Philip Morne wrote Vindicii Contraterinos, a defense against tyrants, and both of those Protestant books made the covenantal case that a Christian people can lawfully resist a tyrant who breaks covenant. Both books were built on a single verse the Apostles spoke to a hostile ruling council in the Book of Acts. We must obey God rather than men. And that is what the pilgrims believed when they got on a boat full of holes in it. You only get when you have a providential understanding of God, which is to say, we are going to go through really difficult times. And we're going to be tested and many of us are going to die. But this is still God's work. And so you can extend much farther in a providential civilization than you can in a civilization based on Aristotle. On July 4th in 1776, 56 men in Philadelphia signed a document. Most Americans were taught to read it as a political manifesto, an enlightenment charter, a statement of natural rights, but read and plain theology with the Protestant Bible open. The Declaration of Independence is something else entirely. It is a writ of divorce. A covenantal people under God, formally severing their bond with the king who had broken the terms of the covenant. Listing his violations one by one, the way a wife might list the grievances of an unfaithful husband, appealing in the last line to the supreme judge of the world for the rectitude of their intentions. Not to the Pope, not to a bishop, not to a council, to God himself, directly. It's one of the most Protestant political documents ever written. If you look at 19th century America, just look at names of towns. You would not be shocked to find someone named Obadiah. Lots of cities and towns that are named after places in the Bible. If you send a letter to a party named Smith or Brown and Salem, you better put the state down in plain writing because there are, let's see, 27 states. Yeah, that's right, 27 that call a city or a town or a village by that name. Isn't anyone going to Salem today? Is anyone going to Salem, this wave? Salem made a Washington Arkansas or Oregon. There are 27 ways to Salem in the U. It was not a truncated New Testament sort of thing. It was the whole Bible. Those are Old Testament names because the men who built this country did not think they were building Rome's empire. They thought they were building Israel's nation under Israel's God according to Israel's covenantal pattern. 27 Israel's, where as the gospel is preached in all these nations and the gospel takes root, we give them their Bibles and we give them the whole thing, Genesis to Revelation. And we expect people to read the Bible and they start naming their kids and naming building in terms of the entirety of scripture. A covenantal nation is built on small acts of stewardship. Every dollar you spend is a vote. Every dollar either builds the kind of country your grandchildren will inherit or funds the one tearing it down. Patriot mobile is America's only Christian conservative wireless provider. They run on all three major networks so you get the same nationwide coverage as the big carriers without sending your money to companies that hate your faith and your country. A portion of every bill defends the unborn, supports the military and veteran community, protects the first and second amendments. Keep your number, keep your phone, switch in minutes with their 100% US based team. Go to patreon mobile.com slash cross politic or call 972 patriot. Use the code cross politic for a free month of service. Stop funding the people tearing the covenant down. Start building the nation. So America was built on a covenant. Justification by faith alone, solar scriptura, two kingdoms, covenantal nationhood, resistance theory, a Protestant people who are under God who built a decentralized federation of free states and became in the province of God the greatest nation in the history of the world. And then something broke. Because the same country that built this covenant is now the country producing identity politics, transgenerism, abortion on demand, and a flood of men on your screen telling you the whole experiment was a mistake. What happened? For 250 years America has run on a Protestant covenant. Free grace producing free men. Free men producing free institutions. A people who believed God's providence was bigger than their mistakes. But a virus had been fighting to get into the code from the beginning. The virus had a name. It called itself the Enlightenment. It spoke the same language as we did. Liberty writes rebellion, consent of the ungoverned. It even borrowed the ideas of covenant and called it a social contract. But it had quietly unplugged the one thing that made the whole system run. God, the most conservative version of the Enlightenment was John Locke. He wrote about the natural law, natural rights, and he defended the rights of a people to rebel against the tyrant. He sounded just like Christians enough to be trusted, but Locke, he had made three subtle changes. Man was no longer born with original sin. He was born. Locke said with a blank slate. The state was no longer bound by covenant. It was bound by contract. And God was no longer the judge over the affairs, but he was at best a distant guarantor. Strip God out of the covenant and the covenant becomes a mere contract. Strip original sin out of man and man becomes a self-authoring God. Strip the Bible out of the founding. And the founding becomes, well, whatever the next generation wants it to be. Classical liberalism in this Lockean sense was the attempt to keep the blessings of Protestant civilization while quietly removing its foundation. And for a while, it worked. The Protestant soil was rich enough to grow Lockean crops. But soil runs out. And here's what grew in the exhausted field. Every Puritan category is still there. Stain, guilt, purity, election, reprobation, the need for escape goat, the search for the righteous, they kept the structure, they just replaced the content. What identity politics does is it turns this on its side. And instead of searching for a transcendent answer to the problem of man's irredeemable sin, it looks for a horizontal one. So one group is the permanently stained group and then there's all these other innocent victims. And so right now the prime transgressors, we know is the white heterosexual Christian male. And every group aligns itself with respect to that group. The vertical answer to sin is Christ on a cross, taking sin away of the world. The horizontal answer to sin is finding someone to blame. Identity politics is the horizontal answer. It is a mutant religion that kept the Puritan diagnosis of the soul and throughout the Protestant cure. This is why that most Protestant countries in the history of the world is now producing the most vicious scapegoating movements. The categories come directly from Protestantism. The Savior is now a political coalition. Which brings us to the question, some of the loudest voices on the right are asking right now. If this is a Protestant cancer, is Rome the cure? Conservative Roman Catholics look at identity politics and say, this is what Protestantism built. This is your fault. Come home to Rome and we will fix it. They're half right. Identity politics is a Protestant cancer, but Rome can't cure it. To diagnose the cancer, you have to speak the language of spiritual debt, stain, guilt, irredeemable sin. The need for a transcendent scapegoat, that is Protestant language, that is Reformation language, that is the language of Hebrews and prophets, and the Apostle Paul. Rome doesn't speak that language anymore. Rome speaks the language of nature, Aristotle's language, Fix essence, natural law, teleology, the acorn becoming the tree. You cannot cure a Reformation cancer with Aristotle. Even if Rome wanted to speak the language of spiritual debt, Rome itself is no longer able to, because something happened recently that most Americans missed. If you look at every single person placed on the pontifical, biblical commission, if you look at everyone on that commission today, because everybody was put there by Francis, I don't think a single one of them believes that Matthew wrote Matthew. The Catholic apologists are asking us, how do you know Matthew wrote Matthew? When their own magisterium doesn't know that Matthew wrote Matthew. Catholic scholarship is over here, and Catholic apologetics is over here, and there is a great gulf of fix between the two. There's a great gulf between what Rome markets on YouTube, and what Rome actually teaches in our universities, in our seminaries, and our biblical comments. The Catholic apologists online are selling you a Rome that even the Vatican has quietly left behind. And when you cross the tibre, you will not land in a coinessous church. You will land in Francis's church. Now Leo's. And if you doubt any of this, look at who Rome decides to discipline. You have a Jesuit priest, Father Martin, who is one of the leading proponents of the LGBTQ movement in the world. And Francis sent him numerous positive kind notes, encouraging him in his work. And already Leo has met with him, and there's their smiling and shaking hands. The irony is the only people that Rome will discipline today, and defrock and kick out of the church, are conservatives, people who want the Latin mass, people who are traditional in their in their perspectives. You can be as wild-eyed as you want on everything else, and Rome will not take action against you. Rome will defrock a priest for saying the Old Mass. Rome will praise a priest for blessing what Scripture calls abomination. That's the institution being pitched to you as the cure for America's chaos. A church that cannot police or own bishops being offered as the moral authority over a nation of 300 million. Nancy Pelosi is a Roman Catholic in good standing. Joe Biden, Roman Catholic in good standing. The pope will shake their hands, take communion with them, and fly home. This is not a church that will save your country. This is a church that cannot save herself. So if Rome is not the cure, what actually is? The same thing that built America the first time, a generation of covenanted children who know their Bibles, who know their Catechism, and know the difference between the Puritan diagnosis and the Marxist counterfeit. You cannot outvote identity politics, you cannot out-meam it, you cannot out-fund it. You have to out-raise the children who are going to be immune to it. Liver inheritance is a classical Christian homeschool curriculum built on the exact foundations that the reformers were built on. Daily historical rooted worship to start the day of homeschooling, family style learning, center of classical books, church history, and a solid reformed theology, open and go daily plans K through 12. You're not raising test takers, you are raising covenant children. Children who cannot be catacquized by the culture, because they've already been catacquized by Christ. Go to liveinheritage.info and use the code cross-politic for 10% off that is livingheritage.info. Use cross-politic and get that 10%. Now we started this documentary with the Emperor standing barefoot in the snow. We took you through 1700 years through Constantine, through Canosa, through Martin Luther, walking into Rome and seeing the Pope and armor through the wager the reformers made against Aristotle. Through the covenant that built the podiums both. Through the writ of divorce signed in Philadelphia, through the virus that got into that system and here at the end we returned to the question we started with. Can Roman Catholicism build great nations? In the current clown world that we're in, I don't have any problem going marching together shoulder to shoulder with the Catholic integralist in protesting abortion. Both of us would agree abortion on demand would be outlawed. But let's say we win those victories and now we're the Protestant integralist and the Catholic integralist are looking at each other and say okay now we've got some stuff to sort out. Duff the Pope had jurisdiction in this realm. No. That's the answer. Catholics are welcome allies in the culture war. Many of them have given more to defend the unborn in the family than most Protestants. In the Providence of God, Roman Catholics may build good nations but they will not build great ones because great nations are not built on the word of the Pope. Great nations are built on the word of God. America's a Protestant nation built on the radical liberty of justification by faith alone built on the ultimate authority of solar built on the covenant that God cuts with the people who fear him settled by the explorers and pilgrims who had the adventure of Providence in their hearts and covenant to history in their bones. So I think that's the big difference so that's why I think America has grown so tremendously is because it has this Reformation view that yes we're going to make mistakes but God's there of the end to guide us and so it's much more ambitious. It's much more ambitious than and you see this in the comparison between the United States and Europe or growth rates in Europe which is vestigially Roman Catholic they're very well they don't take risks. An American society because God's Providence is watching over us all will prepare to take much larger risks. So it's a much more ambitious society. It's a society that will go to space and go to the moon and colonize the stars. But I don't think with their stuff you're going to do that frankly. It was the faith Luther rediscovered the faith Calvin articulated. The faith Whitfield proclaimed the faith George Washington believed that distinctly Protestant faith built America and that distinctly Protestant faith is still building the greatest nation on earth. The wager was made 500 years ago and rest assured that wager has not been lost.